How To: Change Your WordPress URL

Posted in: Tutorials by Brad Williams on July 6, 2009

There are two places you need to update your WordPress URL when you plan on changing it.  They are both located under the General > Settings SubPanel.  Update the “WordPress address (URL)” and “Blog address (URL)” values to the new URL for your website.

This is a great tip if you are launching a new or rebranded WordPress website.  Development can happen on http://new.mydomain.com until you are ready to launch.

Optionally if you would like to update this value directly in your WordPress database just run the query below. Make sure you update the value in the query to your new domain before running:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'http://mydomain.com/' WHERE option_name = 'siteurl' OR meta_name = 'home''

How To: Display More Blog Posts in WordPress

Posted in: Tutorials by Brad Williams on

By default WordPress displays 10 blog posts at a time.  You can change this setting under the Settings > Reading SubPanel. Change the number of posts next to “Blog pages show at most” from 10 to any number you like.

Screenshot example shown below:

Remember it’s best to keep this number identical to the “Syndication feeds show the most recent” option.  This can cause paging issues in certain theme templates if not set the same.

How To: Set a Static Home Page for WordPress

Posted in: Tutorials by Brad Williams on

Do you want to set display your blog posts on a page other than your home page?  In WordPress you can set a static page to be your home page.  First create two new pages: Home and Blog.  Then visit the Settings > Reading SubPanel and select “A static page” for the Front page displays option and select the two pages you just created.

Screenshot example shown below:

Once saved all of your blog posts are now displayed on your new Blog page.  Your front page will now display the static page Home.

How To: Block Your WordPress Website from Search Engine

Posted in: Tutorials by Brad Williams on

Do you want to block your WordPress website from being indexed by Google, Yahoo, or any search engine at all?  Just visit the Settings > Privacy SubPanel and enable the option:

I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers

Screenshot example shown below:

Another good idea is to create a robots.txt file in your root WordPress directory with these two lines of code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This also tells search engines to stay away and will not allow your content to be indexed.